This was not the kind of information he could assimilate all at once. His stomach was churning. He looked at his watch. “I have to go back to work.”

“I can wait,” Susan said. “I have my car—I can drive you home.”

Trouble! But there was no avoiding it now.

He stood. “I get off at four.”

“I’ll meet you in the lobby,” Susan Christopher said.

Rain all day, grey down the big office windows as he wheeled his cart around; rain when he followed Susan Christopher out to her car, red-blinking rain all up and down the dark rush-hour streets. Benjamin sank into the front passenger seat as Susan pulled out into the traffic. She said, “Do you know about John, about what he is?”

“A little,” Benjamin said. “I know more about him than I used to. His brain, right? His brain is different.” My brain, too, he thought: it’s where we live. Briefly, he imagined the kind of house called a “semi-detached,” two separate homes butted up against a common wall. Noisy neighbors, Benjamin thought. Used to be the wall was thicker; nothing came through. Now, when John was in control, Benjamin retained some sense of his own existence, as if he had retreated to an upstairs room where he could watch from the window, or just float and dream, while his raucous neighbor shouted and raved.

“His brain is unique,” Susan was saying. “He was made that way. There were hormones—drugs—that changed the way he grew.”

“Dr. Kyriakides.”

Susan nodded.

“And now that’s changing,” Benjamin guessed.

She gave him a second look, maybe surprised that he had guessed. She nodded. “The tissue in the brain is more fragile than anyone expected. It deteriorates—it may be doing that already.”

“A mental breakdown,” Benjamin said.

“Maybe. Maybe even worse than that. Not just for John—for you.

But he could not dispel the image of his brain (John’s brain) as a house, a cavernous mansion, strange and multichambered—now grown brittle, dry, drafty, and susceptible to flash fires. “You don’t really know what might happen.”

“No, not really.”

But something was happening; Benjamin knew it; and he guessed she was right, you couldn’t burn down half a house and leave the other half intact—what happened to John would surely happen to Benjamin, too. For years Benjamin had been John’s shadow, his half-self, a marionette. But in the last few months he had emerged into a real existence—a life; and when he said the word “I” it meant something; he had moved in with Amelie, who looked at him and saw Benjamin. “Benjamin,” she would say. Maybe he had let himself believe that this would go on forever … that John would fade; that John would become the shadow, reduced at last to “John,” a memory. But now maybe we both lose. Maybe we’re both memory.

Susan drove into the core of St. Jamestown, where the peeling apartment towers stood like sentinels. She pulled up at the curb opposite the rooming house, but neither of them moved to get out. Susan turned the heater up.

Benjamin looked thoughtfully at her. “What do you want me to do?”

“I want you to help.”

“Help how?”

“I want you to see Dr. Kyriakides. I want you to let him treat you.”

“Can he change what’s happening?”

“We’re not sure. We’d like to find out.”

But the idea was disturbing. He felt a spasm of unease that was clearly John’s: as if John had rolled over inside him. “John doesn’t want me to do that.”

“He’s reluctant,” Susan admitted. “I’ve spoken to him.”

Benjamin gazed at the rain. “I don’t control him.”

“You control yourself.”

“I’m not sure—I don’t know if I could do something he didn’t really want. I mean, it’s never come to that.”

“I just want you to think about it,” Susan Christopher said. “That’s enough for now.”

“Oh, I’ll think about it.” Benjamin unlatched the door. “You can count on that.”

He crossed the rainy street to the boardinghouse, where the front door opened and Amelie stepped out, hugging herself, glancing a little nervously from Benjamin to the rental car and back. Benjamin was suddenly in love with the look of her under the wet porch awning in her tight jeans and a raggedy sweater and her breath steaming into the cold, wet air. Not for John, he thought: what Susan Christopher had asked for, his “help,” he might give, even if it meant an end to everything he had assembled here, his real life (which might be ending anyway); but not for John or even for himself. For her, he thought, for Amelie on the porch in her old clothes, Amelie who had drawn him out of the vacuum of himself with a word and a touch … because there was a chance, at least, that he might survive where John did not, and he owed her that chance; owed her the possibility of a happy ending; or—if that failed—if everything failed—at least the evidence of his courage.

Susan watched from the Volvo as Benjamin entered the rooming house.

Scary, she thought, how easy it was to accept him as Benjamin. “Multiple personality”—she had seen the movies, the PBS documentaries. But those people had always seemed just slightly untrustworthy, as if the whole thing might be—on some level—a sort of confidence trick, the nervous system’s way of committing a sin without taking the blame.

This was different. Benjamin was not the product of a normal mind pushed beyond its limits. He was an invention—a work of art, a wholly synthetic creation. A “normal” mind, Susan thought, can’t do that. It was a feat unique to John Shaw, as unpredictable and utterly new as the fiercely coiled cortical matter under his skull.

Unnerving.

A new disease, Susan thought. She put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. A new disease for a new species. Hypertrophy of the mind. A cancer of the imagination.

6

Bad night for Amelie.

The rain didn’t let up. Worse, she felt as if a similar cold cloudiness had invaded the apartment. Benjamin was quiet all through dinner, which was spaghetti and bottled sauce with some extra garlic and hamburger; the kind of meal Amelie assumed a man would like, substantial, with the steam from the cookpot fogging the windows. Amelie seldom had the opportunity to fix dinner. But today was her day off; she had planned this in advance.

Benjamin was quiet all through the meal. He didn’t pay attention to the food, ate mechanically, frowned around his fork.

She put on the kettle for coffee, brooding.

It was that woman, Amelie knew, the one who had come looking for John—the one who had driven Benjamin home. She had said something to him; she was on his mind. Amelie wanted to ask what this was all about, but she was scared of seeming jealous. Of seeming not to trust him. Maddeningly, Benjamin didn’t talk about it either. His silence was so substantial it was like an item of clothing, a strange black hat he had worn into the house. She tried to negotiate around it, to accommodate herself to his mood … but it was too obvious to really ignore.

She stacked the dishes and put Bon Jovi on the stereo. The tape-player part still worked, but Roch’s little two-step had twisted the tonearm off its bearings. Amelie hoped Benjamin wouldn’t notice. She didn’t want to tell him about Roch.

The truth was that Amelie didn’t feel too secure about men in general. She imagined that if she had a shrink this was the kind of thing she would confess to him. I don’t feel too secure about men. It was one of those things you can know about yourself, but knowing doesn’t make it better. Maybe this was because of her shitty adolescence, her absentee father—who knew what? On TV these problems always had neat beginnings and tidy, logical ends. In life, it was different. The time when she came here from Montreal with Roch—that was an example.